Santa Margarita Catholic High School's pep squad director Dana Maas takes a video on her iPhone as the girls say a message to Caleigh Haber, who is in San Francisco pursuing a culinary degree. Tumble-a-Thon on Dec. 12 raised money for Hader's double lung transplant.

Caleigh Haber has wanted to be a pastry chef ever since middle school.

Her father used to cook all the time at their Rancho Santa Margarita home, Haber said, and she stood beside him.

“We really liked the time that we’d spent together,” Haber, 23, said. “I like creating things that people come together for and people smile over and moments in life people remember.”

Haber was on track to achieve her dream. She graduated from California Culinary Academy in San Francisco and began work in the city as a pastry cook at Restaurant Gary Denko.

Now, her goal is on hold.

Haber has cystic fibrosis, a disease that damages her lungs and digestive system. Her lungs work at less than 20 percent of the average person’s capacity. She needs a double-lung transplant to survive, she said.

“Right now, I’m literally fighting to live because my lungs are dying,” she said in a phone interview from Stanford Hospital & Clinics. “I don’t have reserves on my lungs now. I need a transplant as soon as possible.”

Haber had an active childhood and high school life despite the genetic disorder and having to take up to 60 pills a day. She competed in varsity cheerleading all four years at Santa Margarita Catholic High School, even after the cystic fibrosis became aggressive.

Though she got pneumonia and was in and out of the hospital, Haber never missed a competition or game, said Dana Maas, her cheerleading coach at Santa Margarita. She’d tumble, yell and grin right alongside her teammates.

“They have two and a half minutes on the floor, and she’d come off and just collapse,” Maas said. “I would give her an inhaler and help her breathe.”

After high school, Haber moved solo to San Francisco to chase that childhood dream. At times, she attended culinary classes with intravenous lines connected.

At Gary Denko, she worked from noon to 3 a.m. “I felt very privileged to be there. I would come home and would not want to go to sleep because I wanted to be at work constantly,” she said.

The hard work took a toll. Haber got lung infection in September 2012 and was hospitalized for several months. She dropped 27 pounds from her 4-foot-11 frame because she had no appetite.

She could barely breathe and required an oxygen tank. She couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom. Doctors told her she was too sick to get a lung transplant.

“My only option was to go home and try to gain weight and try to fight with what I had in me,” she said. “Somehow, something in me pulled it together. And for a year, I ate all I could.”

She regained some weight, and her health has improved dramatically in the past five weeks, said her mother, Lizeth Haber. Doctors advised the family to start raising money for a transplant.

Caleigh Haber said her family will need at least $50,000 for out-of-pocket expenses related to the transplant, medical care after the surgery and to move closer to the hospital. The family has set up a website, fight2breathe.org, to raise funds.

Haber must continue to add weight and stabilize her blood-sugar level to become eligible for the transplant. She’s faced a blood infection and blood clots in recent weeks, and required a blood transfusion Monday to deal with her low blood-oxygen level.

“There’s no room for error at this point,” Lizeth Haber said.

Despite the difficulties, Caleigh Haber said the support she’s getting makes her feel lucky. “People from all over the world are reaching out to me every day and writing to me. I think those people are keeping me strong.”

Tomoya Shimura covers Irvine for the Orange County Register. Prior to his stint at the Register, Tomoya had worked as a news reporter and sports writer for the Daily Press in Victorville. He won several awards for his work there, including the best business story from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. Tomoya received his M.S. in sports studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He earned his B.A. in liberal arts from International Christian University in Tokyo.